Trying out Adobe's forms-in-pdf... what a mess. What worked with version up to 8, won't work in 9. Tried to create such pdfs using eval versions of several tools, and none would. Horrible case of trying to corner your market and bind your users into incompatibility with everybody else.
Which is exactly why search for "fillable pdf" yields almost no results - even government doesn't do it (though I remember filling such a form, saving it, sending as attachment... seven or eight years ago). Oh, it would be nice if you could have pdf forms that you download, fill them on your computer and email them back. I think I actually used one of those years ago. But no, the standard procedure is to download the form, print it, fill by hand, scan, send the image. Or, when they are fillable, you can't save them, so you fill them, print, scan, send the image. Then someone on the recipient side has to view (probably from paper), and type the data in. Because Adobe.
Market sucks, quite often.
And yet another political dialogue with someone on UA:
>>>The U.S. step, assailed by some conservatives who say it is sketchy and rewards North Korea's bad behavior, is aimed at salvaging a faltering disarmament accord before Bush leaves office in january.
>>It's so nice to know there's such a country on this world which will watch over every other country's behavior and dole out rewards.
>Why did you move to the US?
So I get the chance to see it all up close and personal and say what I mean straight, not behind anyone's back.
Next time Serbia rewards the good behavior of the US, I'll make sure that any US citizens there get all the chance they want to express their satisfaction on any forums of their choice, and that someone will politely ask them why did they chose to move there.
>It seems that you complain/criticise about pretty much everything this country does?
Ah, no, not everything - and this wasn't actually a critique per se, you seem to be so effing sensitive. It's just when it starts playing world's cop and doing things normal countries don't, that I get this wish to point out how absurd it would look if we, just for a moment, assumed that countries are equal by international law.
I assume this is about the time we last watched TV. Saw the last episode of one of them forensics, the CSI (aka ξ, the greek letter) of the Las Vegas original. Both NY and Miami franchises went into washing the dirty laundry of the main character too soon, and have run out of fresh plots. Thus in the following weeks there was nothing but krismissy green-and-red, so we simply turned the TV off.
Under today's date there's an unpacked game of Carmageddon, which we seriously played, girls and I, back in the nineties, it's a Dos game. Pretty convincing as a driving simulation, may it be just VGA graphics, it sufficed at the time, more than sufficed, we played it for all it was worth. Don't know how much luck we had trying to play it now, because it wasn't it anymore, the graphic was crummy and the game didn't behave properly anymore, it was written back in the day when everyone cheated, squeezing every Dos bug out there to sneak some dirty trick to make the code faster. Not that m$ fixed any of it meanwhile, they don't fix they only write new, but there were enough changes to make it cough, fumble and just barely work.
On seventeenth, blogue:
Killing the media softly with those ads
Advertising is a parasite which kills hosts. Just think of it, how many media have been used to carry ads, then got disused because they were saturated by ads. When was the last time you got something meaningful in your mail, from a person with no commercial relation? Happened with radio as well - can't find a good station which won't try to sell something at least once every 15 minutes, even if it's to advertise its self or its "supporters". The movies still have a rather good ratio - you get 15 minutes of ads before it starts, and have product placement throughout the movie (or careful non-placement, i.e. out of 20 beer bottles on the table, none show labels). TV, gone. There may be a few isolated places in TV space where you have to pay several layers of subscription to get to; the rest has gone. Even the schedule channel is actually a sale channel - they used to have the top third of the screen showing some chat about upcoming shows, and the lower 2/3 rolling the schedule, and it took about two minutes to see the 100 channels. Now it's top 2/3 showing ads and it takes about 4 minutes to see all channels. And they reshuffle channels at least once a year, so I never get to forget how to operate the menu on the TV - to tune those onscreen shops out.
Newspapers used to live on their own sales, and have ads as just an extra service. Now many of them are sold at ridiculously low prices (300 pages of high print Vogue for $2 - not kidding) because they make more money on ads than they would ever make selling. So you get twenty articles, spread across sixty or eighty pages, and the rest are ads. "Wired" was a bit better, though. That's a magazine which still sells content - but on the other end of the spectrum, just look at the number of editions you get for free at the grocery's exit. All paid by ads, just take one.
Posters. Once upon a time, when local governments wanted to announce something, they'd print it and post it around the place. Now in countries and the few places in the US with pedestrian traffic, when was the last time you saw a public announcement on a poster board? Even "poster board" means something else nowadays.
The phone system has telemarketers. Cell phones may have spam SMS (don't know how far did that go, though - with recipient paying for the message as well that would provoke a lot of rage).
Any internet medium has got its own spam. Email being the most notorious case, its rules have changed so much by ads that one has to know ropes very well to get a message through. You either have to have accepted messages from each other before, or your message has to look quite innocent - avoiding any attachments, links, inserted images, dollar amounts, anything that may be considered spam - at least until we establish an email relationship. I've already had cases where old friends tried to contact me, but didn't know these rules and their messages were junked.
Ads drove most of the web (probably - I have no idea - adBlock rulez ;), to the point where starting a serious website has become pretty much impossible because your choices are
- do it less seriously, in your free time - you can't afford the time and resources it takes
- try collecting subscriptions from the visitors and get nowhere
- try building traffic and hope it will be enough to get you enough ad revenue.
The point here is that you can't sell a service on the web, because somebody else will be doing the same thing for free, hoping to attract traffic and make money on ads.
Now watch the slow slide of gaming, as in-game ads make inroads. There may really be some minority who would have them, and they may be very vocal, but once the ads take over the games...
14-VIII-2011 - 8-IV-2026